From 12 o'clock going clockwise: Matt Diamond, Alloy CEO; James Johnson, COO of Alloy, both of these Alloy co-founders have made big money off of offering questionable content to teens and preteens. The latest slime they are promoting is Gossip Girl (promoting underage drinking, casual sex, and drug use)
Kent Haehl, was C1's chief ad salesman now he's their CEO. He doesn't have much of an education or journalism background, but he 's an expert on how to get kids to buy things they don't necessarily need.
Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen, He gives C1 money and in return they air stories that the Knight Foundation wants children to see. You would think the idea of funding news stories would be loathsome to Ibarguen, it is not.
Andrew Knopf, Hired away from the sleazy WWE wrestling network, he is in charge of buying ads for C1. This can't be good.
Tony Anderson, Jessica Kumari and Chris Browne are all on-air personalities for C1. They want to advance their careers on the backs of school kids. Students have to watch them, so these "reporters" have a guaranteed audience no matter how good or bad they are. The fact that students in lower-income areas are disproportionately saddled with Channel One doesn't phase these three at all. If students lose school time while these three practice for their next broadcast job, well, tough. Life's unfair.
The black and white photo is of Dr. Paul "Dude, Where's My Car?" Folkemer. He was just hired in January 2008 to be the "Director of Education." When he worked for C1N before, he approved all commerials and he allowed some awful stuff to come into classrooms. One movie advertised on his watch was the drug comedy "Dude, Where's My Car?" It is unsettling to see him come back to Channel One News.

These nine people in various ways feed off Channel One's captive audience. All of them should be should be escorted off the school's premises. The vast majority of U.S. schools do not allow the showing of Channel One News. Channel One News continues to lose schools. If your school still shows C1, this is the year to end this nonsense and add an hour of teaching back to the school week.

From Jim Metrock:

This morning, May 5, I made this copy of Channelone.com's home page. There is no news except for a few headlines racing across the screen on a blue background.

Everything else is filler. "Play of the Week" is filler. "Project Prom" is filler. There are two contests which are promoting movies advertised in the classroom.

Take a look at the "breaking news" headlines: "OLYMPICS: Torch Welcomed in Hong Kong" "RACES: Your Ky. Derby Guide."

The lazy employees of Channel One News have had those same headlines running across their site since Friday morning, May 2. There were no newer headlines or articles added after these on May 2.

If a young person clicked on the "RACE" story, he or she would read the article at the bottom.

In the real world, Big Brown won the Derby on SATURDAY. Eight Belles was tragically put to death on SATURDAY - two days ago! Yet Channel One News was still providing kids with a "guide" to the "upcoming Kentucky Derby." All the other news stories were equally as old and stale. The Olympics story from Hong Kong was from Friday morning.

What is significant about Friday Morning? That's easy. Channel One's TV show is taped a day ahead. So Friday's show was in the can the day before. Nobody at Channel One has to show up for work on Friday. The weekend starts early for the news hounds at Channel One. The last person out the door around 2 am Friday morning, probably cut and pasted a few May 2 wire stories onto the Channelone.com web site and turned off the lights. Nobody thought about the website until midday today - Monday, May 5.

Channel One News doesn't care about informing young people. Examples like this show how lazy and sloppy they are. The company has earned their tarnished reputation.

Channel One came close to going out of business last year. The company is considered a joke by many educators. Schools administrators wipe their shoes on Channel One's contract. Schools openly defy Channel One. They don't show the program and they are not going to hand over their TV sets. The company is in a terrible situation. You would think this would make Channel One executives and other employees work HARDER. Instead, they appear to be a totally demoralized group who care more about their free time than their work time. And it shows in their work product.

Are we beginning to see why Channel One has lost 2,000,000 out of its 8,000,000 students since 2002?

Print out this brochure and show your school board and Superintendent that you are not alone in supporting commercial-free buses and classrooms.

Channel One News personnel abandoned their booth at the 2008 NSBA exhibit hall.

From Jim Metrock:

I was very proud to have a booth at the recent National School Boards Association annual conference. The attendance in the exhibit hall had never been better. There were school board members from all over the country. Several people from Alaska and more than a few from Canada came by our booth along with many hundreds more from all over. Canadians almost to a one knew how their teachers and the public fought and ultimately killed the Channel One News-clone in their country called YNN (Youth News Network). They, along with the vast majority of those we talked to, gave Obligation great encouragement to keep battling the commercial exploitation of schoolchildren.

Channel One also had a booth at the NSBA. In fact they had a double booth twice the size of ours. They had at least three people manning their booth. (I stayed away from their booth for the first two days of the exhibit, but did look down the aisle occasionally.)

The exhibit hall was open Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. All exhibitors were under strict orders to not dismantle or leave their booth unattended before 2:00 PM on Monday. This makes good sense. If people leave a booth and go home early or if they dismantle their booth while others are trying to talk to school board members, then it would be a great detriment to those exhibitors who remain. No exhibitor wants to be around a booth that is unstaffed. It takes away from the whole exhibition experience both for school board members and other exhibitors.

Around noon on Monday I looked down the aisle to see if Dr. Paul Folkemer the Education VP for Channel One and a natural for being at the NSBA conference had shown up. He was AWOL for the first two days. What I saw stunned me. Not only was Dr. Folkemer still missing, but there was nobody at their booth. I then thought that they had taken a break and would be back. I checked again at 1:00 PM and still no one was there.

It was very apparent that Channel One News people had either abandoned their booth at least by noon or they had not shown up at all on Monday.

This says a lot about this company. Maybe more than they want the public to know.

Did they leave because Obligation was handing out a brochure that documented the past problems with their "news" show? By "documented" I mean FULLY documented. We have an extensive supporting page for the brochure. No one can possibly challenge anything in our brochure whereas Channel One's big whopper claim of "digital clear" is misleading to say the least.

I walked down to their booth for the first time since the conference began. I had stayed away from their booth so no one could claim I was bothering them, but now with no one there I took these pictures. It was like a ghost town.

From their corporate point, the employees who decided not to show up for work were totally irresponsible. Tucking tail and running away is not a strategy, at least not for viable companies that have nothing to be afraid of.

In business you should never let them see you sweat, and Channel One broke that rule. Their abandoned booth shouted, "Defeated!" I guess they just couldn't counter the arguments we made for commercial-free classrooms.

There was literature on their tables, but I saw no one picking any up. The Channel One director chairs were empty. They had a TV set (much better than Channel One's typical classroom TV) and it was on, but it had an error message displayed which seemed fitting.

If they didn't show up the last day because they thought there would be few people coming through the exhibit hall they were mistaken. There was good traffic at our booth except for the last hour and even then I was putting together brochure packets up until five minutes before 2:00 PM.

Maybe Channel One wants to attend conferences where only one side of the story can be told - theirs.

It's funny that Channel One is surviving on a $2.3 million grant by the Knight Foundation to encourage appreciation of the First Amendment. Channel One's history is known to most: They detest and viciously fight anybody who disagrees with its business model. For years, Channel One paid lobbyist Jack Abramoff hundreds of thousands of dollars to crush public efforts to keep Federal tax dollars from funding their company. In 1999, they created a sham "organization" called the "Coalition To Protect Our Children" to try to undermine a U.S. Senate hearing on their company. Channel One is rough on any one or group that stands in the way of their revenue.

On that last day of the NSBA exhibition I couldn't help but think of the contrast. Obligation's booth was a roaring success. Pat Ellis, Obligation's Education Director, and I could not have met nicer people during the exhibit. And then there's Channel One News. Neither the president of the company nor the VP of Education, both newly hired, cared to come to talk to school board members and superintendents.

As I looked at the forsaken Channel One News booth I picked up one of their handouts that had fallen on the floor. It read, "Your students count on you. Count on us to help." Yet there was no one there to help a soul. There was no one there to even hand out handouts. I felt like I was walking through a tornado-destroyed home, picking up a piece of something that once seemed important.

Channel One's NSBA display boasts of "digital clear" picture.

From Jim Metrock:

Channel One Network and their parent company Alloy Media and Marketing are purposefully misleading educators, school board members, school administrators and the general public with their claims of "digital clear" and "state-of-the-art digital video system."

I have sent an email to Channel One CEO Kent Haehl asking him to remove this language from their marketing efforts. So far, Mr. Haehl has not replied.

Here's the reason why Channel One is wrong to make these claims.

First a review of Channel One's TV network. There is a satellite dish that receives the show every weekday. There is a "head-end" unit that takes that signal and distributes it to the classroom TV sets via wiring.

Channel One has upgraded only the head-end unit or the receiver. The new unit is a DVR-receiver that has the POTENTIAL of improving picture quality A LITTLE.

The two main purposes of this upgrade are to minimize maintenance calls and to help get a more accurate audience number so advertisers can be assured they are not overpaying.

As far as I know, Channel One has not replaced one analog TV set with a digital TV. The "digital upgrade" had nothing to do with the TV sets in classrooms.

That is why using the term "state-of-the-art" as describing their TV network is absurd. It's a big, fat lie.

I have several TV sets in my home. Recently, I upgraded to the digital cable option. Now I am getting a digital signal to all my TV sets and of course my monthly bill went up for the digital signal. But the extra cost is worth it to me because I have two High Definition TV sets. The picture is incredible, as everyone knows who has HD TV in their home.

The digital cable is also hooked up to my two old 27" TV sets. The digital signal I am paying extra for is wasted on these TVs. The picture is lousy - compared with the HD picture on the plasma screens. My friends in the TV world tell me that a digital signal sent to an analog TV set improves the picture quality a fraction. It is barely enough to notice and most people don't see any change.

Channel One's new DVR receivers may be the most up-to-date receivers in the business, but their TV sets are based on the 60-year-old analog TV system people my age grew up with. Channel One's present TV sets can only display 480 lines on the screen and only 240 lines at a time. A half of a picture is shown every 1/60 of a second. This is called interlacing. The 240 odd number lines are shown then the 240 even number lines.

A digital signal can provide up to 5 times more pixels than the old analog signal could deliver, but it's all wasted on Channel One's old TV sets.

If you went to Best Buy and told the sales person you wanted a "state-of-the-art digital video system" for your home, you would be quite upset if you paid big money for digital cable or satellite service, top-of-the-line wiring and cabling, a digital video recorder, and then find out they are installing a circa 1994 19" Magnavox analog color TV set to connect to your digital signal.

When a person hears Channel One say its picture is "digital clear" they have an anticipation of a very clear picture on a digital TV screen. Channel One's management is misrepresenting its product because the company is in such bad shape financially. Being down on your luck is no excuse to try to fool schools.

For Channel One to offer a true "digital clear" picture to its remaining schools they would have to replace all the TV sets with digital ones and that would cost over $250 million. (Assuming $1000 for a discounted 40" LCD flat panel TV set X 250,000 classrooms that still have Channel One TVs.) That is way too much money for Channel One's parent company to spend. Therefore there will more than likely never be a "state-of-the-art Channel One TV experience."

It's time for Channel One's executives to come clean with the American public.

Obligation's Pat Ellis hands out commercial-free classroom materials to appreciative school board members.

From Jim Metrock:

Our booth at the 2008 National School Board Association convention has been an outstanding success. The number of visitors to our booth has exceeded any other year we have been at the NSBA and the feedback has been overwhelmingly supportive of commercial-free classrooms and school buses.

Obligation handed out brochures on Channel One's past content and on Bus Radio.

Channel One had a booth at the convention, but Bus Radio wasn't there.

I was surprised that Channel One's Senior VP of Education Dr. Paul Folkemer was not at the Channel One booth for the first two days of the convention. There is one more day to go (Monday). Maybe he will show up.

It has been thrilling to meet so many selfless school board members and superintendents. Pat and I received a lot of encouragement in our efforts to raise awareness of Channel One's and Bus Radio's efforts to commercially exploit schoolchildren.

I'll post more soon about the convention.

Click here to download this brochure. (PDF format)